‘We hoped for higher Vita sales’ – Sony

Vita hasn’t exactly been the roaring success Sony would have been hoping for, but we never expected Sony to say as much. In an interview for the latest issue of Play, PlayStation UK managing director Fergal Gara admitted that Vita has so far failed to live up to the company’s expectations.

“Being open and honest, I think we would have hoped for higher sales,” he said in discussion of Vita’s performance so far. “I guess it entered a market which was much more complicated than it was when Vita was first conceived and designed. The positive, though, is that it most certainly does the job it was intended to do very well and the feedback from gamers is exactly that – it’s a powerful device that satisfies them. While not growing dramatically, it’s not falling away or dying and that’s great to see.”

But while Sony might be under no illusions that Vitas are flying off of shelves across the world, hopes are high that connectivity with PS4 will see sales of the handheld – which now features a flash about PS4 Remote Play on the front of the box – slowly climb closer to Sony’s expectations, although Gara doesn’t think Vita will surpass PSP’s sales.

“The PSP and Vita landed into considerably different worlds,” he told us. “As far as the Vita is concerned, the advent of handheld gaming on phone and tablets complicated the marketplace. While we believe that the Vita is a specialist device that does the job better than other alternatives, people can only carry so many devices – and the people that want the very specialist experience is not as large as the pool of people that just want any gaming experience available to them on the go. Having said that, of course the PSP is a reference point. The Vita doesn’t look likely to achieve the same sales levels as the PSP, but the encouraging thing is that Vita sales are not declining and its new role with the PS4 has only just begun.”